Thoughts on life, God and faith from a local church minister and teacher

Monday, January 7, 2013

After Newtown: Is The Right to Bear Arms Right?

“A well regulated
militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep
and bear arms shall not be infringed.”--The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Does a legal right ever make a wrong?

It’s now been almost a month since a gunman walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, Connecticut, opened fire and killed twenty
school children and six adults.It was
the second most deadly mass shooting in the history of the United States, surpassed only by the killing of
32 people by a gunman at Virginia
Tech University
in 2007.

A lot has happened since December 14. Victims have been laid
to rest. Thousands of folks visited Newtown
to offer sympathy and support. Prayers have been prayed in houses of worship
worldwide. Funds raised for the victims’ families. Vice President Joe Biden
leads a gun control task force.Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is pushing for new gun control laws
here.The National Rifle Association
(NRA) came out with rhetorical guns blazing a week after the shooting,
declaring that the real problem was not enough guns in the hands of law abiding
citizens. They want an armed guard in every school in America.

But nothing has happened really.America is still the most armed
nation in the entire world by far, with 270,000,000 guns in civilian hands in
our country.That’s about nine guns for
every ten Americans.The next closest
rate of gun ownership is in Yemen,
at about half of our number.The United States still has the highest rate of gun
related murders among all developed countries in the world: four times as many
firearms deaths as the next two nations, Turkey
and Switzerland.Americans are twenty times more likely to be
killed by a gun than in any other of its peer nations: Japan, Britain,
France, Germany, etc.

So I guess we Americans still do love our guns, Newtown be damned.Guns to protect ourselves, our loved ones and
our property, right?Guns to protect
ourselves from the government, as I’ve heard some more radical gun rights
proponents argue.If the people are well
armed, they will not be ruled by tyrants. And it is not like the Second
Amendment right to bear arms is threatened. Just five years ago, the United
States Supreme Court ruled that the individual right to bear arms for lawful
purposes is constitutionally guaranteed and unconnected to service in a
militia.

But here’s one question that’s yet to be asked: is a right
always right?

What if America’s
unquestioned individual right to bear arms infringes on my individual right as
a non-gun owning citizen to my life, my liberty and the pursuit of my
happiness?As someone who does not own a
gun, who has absolutely no interest in ever possessing or firing a gun (which
is, after all, designed to kill): have I any rights in this debate?Any at all?

Like the right to know that I am safe in public, even as so
many of my fellow citizens are packing heat. The federal government’s General
Accounting Office estimates 8,000,000 Americans have permits to carry a
concealed weapon. If that reality makes me feel much less safe, that so many of
my neighbors potentially have a hidden weapon on their person, do I have any
recourse? How do I know that they even know how to properly use that gun or
have the mental stability to own a weapon?How do I know that their gun won’t be inadvertently used to hurt or kill
me the next time I’m in line at Starbucks and a cowboy or cowgirl feels
threatened by whatever and decides to open up?

If I had a child, could they be forced to attend a school
where armed guards and even teachers possess a weapon? What of my right to have
a son or daughter educated in a truly safe place? Can the NRA or anyone else
guarantee that when the guns come out the next time in a school house, my son
or daughter won’t be wounded or killed by an errant bullet fired by a well
meaning but inept “protector”? Can the local school committee now insist our
children go to a school marked by the four r’s—reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and
rifles?

I get the notion of individual rights. I’m grateful for all
the individual legal rights I live under and enjoy as an American.But what I do not get is the continued
dogmatic, rabid, stubborn, unyielding, and ultimately selfish and deadly
insistence by the NRA and folks of that ilk that their right to bear arms is
untouchable.Sacred even.

Like it is a constitutional god to be so worshipped that any
effort to regulate or limit that right is a civic sin.That this right trumps any and all other
rights, any notion of community responsibility or moderation or logic or
reason.

You may have a right to your gun.But I have a right as well, to live in a safe
nation, a community not just safe from the “bad guys”, but also safe from the
supposed “good guys” who still so love their guns and their “rights”.